Will University of Michigan's free tuition plan really help students?

ANN ARBOR, MI - Two years before the University of Michigan made waves in the higher education world announcing the creation of the Go Blue Guarantee - a free-tuition program - it was introduced to the power of sending a convincing message to promising students from low-income backgrounds.

Launched in August 2015, the HAIL Scholarship was intended to attract high-achieving, low-income students from across the state by providing four years of free tuition - a value of about $60,000 - bringing in 262 students to enroll at UM in its first year.

UM President Mark Schlissel said the university experimented with how it sent out letters attempting to lure attractive candidates from low-income areas with the scholarship. One letter, which was sent to 1,000 students, expressed that if they were admitted, they'd receive a free four-year scholarship. The other letter, sent to another 1,000 students, expressed that if they applied and were admitted, they would be eligible for "very generous need-based aid."

The results spoke for themselves, Schlissel said during UM's bicentennial colloquium featuring a number of administrators from prominent higher education institutions.

"The group where we used the word 'free,' two-and-a-half fold more of them applied," Schlissel said. "That's huge. The financial aid packages (in the HAIL Scholarship and Go Blue Guarantee) are almost the same. So that's a lesson to us about how you market and express these financial aid concepts. You have to be quite clear to get people over the threshold."

That is the challenge many of the country's top institutions face: Attracting top talent from low-income areas through proper messaging, while taking into consideration proper context in the admissions process.

At Stanford University, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne said the university has made strides in making college more affordable for students, noting that 79 percent of its students graduate without any debt.

Providing more financial aid to students from under-served sectors of the population, however, hasn't helped Stanford attract as diverse a student population as Tessier-Lavigne would like to see.

"It leads us to what's probably a bigger problem for us, because I think we have made strides with affordability, and that is reaching into underprivileged populations," Tessier-Lavigne said during UM's colloquium. "We don't have enough students from underprivileged sectors of society entering our ranks. They don't know about us, or they know about us and they don't think it's worth applying. We have to get the message out to them that in fact they can prosper and it is affordable."

Facing critics

While the announcement of the Go Blue Guarantee was largely met with applause for its efforts to attract students from low-income families, it was not met without some opposition.

Some critics of the Go Blue Guarantee say its most effective component is its marketability, perhaps most notably Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University.

Goldrick-Rab, who examines the rising cost of college in her book "Paying the Price," described the Go Blue Guarantee as the "cheapest advertising UM's ever bought," noting that UM already gives generous financial aid to low-income students beyond just tuition.

She also pointed to a recent report by the Equality of Opportunity Project, which appeared in the New York Times' The Upshot. The report found the median family income of a student at the UM is $154,000, which is the highest of 27 public colleges classified as "highly selective."

Goldrick-Rab said despite covering tuition for low-income students, UM has a particularly low enrollment of Pell grant recipient students, accounting for 16.4 percent of its enrollment on the Ann Arbor campus in 2014-15.

"That makes you think there are other barriers and there is one - it's really hard to get in," Goldrick-Rab told The Ann Arbor News.

"I get the idea that what they're trying to do is say, 'You, too, can come here,' but I don't see they've produced much evidence of bringing in low-income students," she added.

According to Cooperative Institutional Research Program data provided by UM, first-year students whose family income was less than $60,000 made up 15.2 percent of the population surveyed - nearly identical to the 15 percent figure from 2006.

Students populations whose families earned $60,000 to $74,999 and $75,000 to $99,999 also dropped from 2006 to 2016, while students whose families earned $250,000 or more nearly doubled, from 12.8 percent to 24.5 percent.

One way this could be addressed is through using a test-optional model for its admission process, similar to how it is done at Temple, Goldrick-Rab said, where prospective students can submit self-reflective, short-answers to a few specially designed, open-ended questions instead of their SAT or ACT scores.

Goldrick-Rab said many low-income students don't have access to course prep for standardized tests like higher-income students do, which allows universities to prioritize other things in the admissions process. Providing free or reduced cost housing, she added, is another way to attract low-income students because it is a primary driver of taking out student loans.

"There are ways of putting a thumb on the scale when it comes to family income," she said. "They do it for legacies and in athletics, but not for low-income students."

Dennis Epple, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, said leaving standardized test scores out of the admissions equation would be a mistake.

Epple, who has been published extensively on school admission policies, said without standardized tests scores, admission decisions would be subjective.

"Such subjectivity can result in admission decisions that do not benefit either the university or meritorious low-income students," Epple said in an email. "This is not to say other student qualifications should not be weighed significantly in admissions. These include grades, advanced courses taken, leadership positions and so on. It is also appropriate to take account of hardships disadvantaged students may have faced."

Other critics say cutting the free tuition guarantee off at a $65,000 income level leaves out the middle class, who might be earning slightly above that. The Detroit News, in response to the announcement of the Go Blue Guarantee wrote in an editorial that the guarantee "has diverted the conversation from yet another tuition hike in Ann Arbor," while asserting that "middle-class students will find the state's premier public university further from their reach."

Schlissel responded to the editorial with one of his own appearing in the Detroit News on June 21, noting that UM's growing investment in need-based financial aid has resulted in the net cost of attending the university going down over the past decade for middle-class Michiganians with family incomes up to about $110,000.

"UM's admissions process does not consider a student's ability to pay, and financial aid for students from families above the Guarantee's $65,000 income threshold will continue to be supported by our commitment to meeting need at all income levels," Schlissel wrote.

A place for everyone

Epple said UM's creation of the Go Blue Guarantee aims to make it competitive with selective private institutions who already offer substantial financial aid.

"The University of Michigan is a premier public university competing with those selective private universities," Epple said. "Hence, it is quite reasonable for the University of Michigan to provide tuition-free admission to attract exceptional low-income students. Students gain from interacting with good peers. Students from more advantaged backgrounds can benefit in many ways by interacting with bright students from low-income backgrounds."

This includes Princeton University, where students with family incomes up to $140,000 typically pay no tuition. For families making up to $65,000 per year, the private institution's aid package covers full tuition and room and board.

"We've realized we had to recruit them into our applicant pool because students don't know that the financial aid packages are there and they often can't imagine themselves on our campus," Eisgruber said during UM's colloquium. "We've had to look differently at the applications, realizing that the student from a low-income background isn't going to have a fancy internship, but they might have been holding a full-time job to help support their family at the same time they were pulling in great grades at their high school."

Identifying promising students in sub-optimal situations, Schlissel said, is the next step for UM to achieve a more diverse campus that is representative of the state's entire population.

"Looking more deeply into letters of recommendation and activities, the expectations have to be different, based on context," Schlissel said. "We haven't really figured out the right tools that let us identify a kid in a disadvantaged circumstance. ... We have to look harder to identify students in other ways."